Three Years Among the Comanches: The Narrative of Nelson by Nelson Lee

By Nelson Lee

During this reprint of a vintage Indian Captivity Narrative from the nineteenth century, Nelson Lee recounts his adventures and his slender get away from the Comanches in stories approximately too tall to be real. From South the USA to Texas, he unearths event in all places. Lee emerges from one bushy scenario purely to experience into one other bold experience with the chilliness of a Hollywood hero. for 3 years he's held captive one of the Comanches. Tortured by way of his captors, this Texas Ranger survives to inform others approximately what he observes and learns concerning the Comanche tribe, and publishes the best descriptions of the lifetime of the Texas Rangers.

Frequently portrayed via previous historians because the maximum consultant and Indian fighter within the West, package Carson (1809–68) has turn into lately a old pariah—a brutal assassin who betrayed the Navajos, an unwitting dupe of yankee enlargement, and a racist. Many historians now query either his acceptance and his position within the pantheon of yank heroes.

Initially released in 1977, and reprinted numerous tiems due to the fact, touch and Cnoflict continues to be a useful account of the profound influence that white payment had on Native-European family in British Columbia after the fur exchange ended. Robin Fisher argues that the fur exchange had a constrained impact at the cultures of local humans.

Within the early 1800s, whilst keep watch over of the outdated Northwest had now not but been guaranteed to the U.S., the Shawnee leaders Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Prophet, led an intertribal flow culminating on the conflict of Tippecanoe and the conflict of the Thames. Historians have portrayed Tecumseh, the conflict chief, because the key determine in forging the intertribal confederacy.

Additional info for Three Years Among the Comanches: The Narrative of Nelson Lee, the Texas Ranger

Sample text

Some gathered wood and kindled a firesome took charge of the horses, while other sallied out in quest of game for supper. Having satisfied the cravings of appetite, as soon as darkness began to overspread the prairie, we mounted, and riding an hour or more directly out of our general course, halted for the night in the most secluded situation we could discover. The object was to sleep as far as possible from the smoke which the cooking of our supper necessarily created, and which, as it curled into the air, was impossible to hide from the observation of the enemy.

In concluding upon the plan of attack, our great object was to rescue the captured women. It was ascertained, as we anticipated, that they were with the old warriors in the rear of their encampment. A portion of our force, accordingly, made a wide circuit, and falling stealthily upon that point succeeded in saving harmless two of the captives, the other being stabbed to death by an Indian before making his escape. As I approached with another detachment of my comrades from a different direction, a buckshot struck me near the elbow, passing up the arm to the shoulder blade, where it yet remains.

The second portion of his narrative supposedly began in 1855, when a fellow horse trader named William Aiken convinced Lee to move a large herd of horses to markets in California, an illogical decision since the United States, not California, was the major market for such stock. Lee claimed that the animals were rounded up south of the border and slowly herded up the Río Grande. Somewhere east of El Paso, the Comanches struck the party, killing twenty-three men and taking four captive, among them Lee and Aiken.